Wednesday, December 30, 2009

The Rotor-Router Model on Google Maps

Rotor-Router MapsTobias Friedrich of the Max Planck Institut has used custom map tiles with the Google Maps API to display a number of large rotor-router aggregations.

Here's a little explanation of the rotor-router model (also known as 'Propp Machine'),

"Given an arbitrary graph, a random walk of a chip is a path which begins at a given starting point and chooses the next node with equal probability out of the set of its current neighbours. Random walks have been used to model a wide variety of processes in economics, physics, medicine, and mathematics."